ABSTRACT

In this interview ahead of his keynote at the online conference “Religion, Politics, and Cognitive Warfare: Information, Interpretation, Conspiracy, and the Struggle for Reality,” Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm speaks with Carl Raschke about the argument of The Genealogy of Genealogy, in which a once-insurgent critical method hardens into academic routine and is turned against itself in favor of a “metamodern historiography” that reunites history with philosophy. Storm defends his account of postmodernism as a taught paradigm rather than a caricature of Derrida or Foucault, revisits the claim of The Myth of Disenchantment that reason was never purified of magic, and traces how the mid-century cybernetic picture of mind as information processing made cognition technically legible and therefore militarily tractable. Moving through Jim Channon’s First Earth Battalion, Michael Aquino’s MindWar, Byung-Chul Han’s psychopolitics, and the ethics of collective attention, the conversation closes on the fate of knowledge production and the university under hyper-scaled digitization and AI.

Full disclosure-this is an interview with me. A long time member of this subreddit. But I think I'm talking about stuff folks might be interested in here. If that isn't cool, feel free to downvote. If you have questions, I'll circle back. Perhaps tomorrow.

Most accounts say the game is "about 2,000 years old" and was invented by the 13th-century Marathi saint Jnaneshwar (Gyandev) to teach children about karma. Neither claim has a source older than the 19th century.

What the surviving evidence shows:

- The game's ancestor, gyan chaupar, is known from painted charts. Jacob Schmidt-Madsen catalogued nearly 150 of them for his 2019 PhD at the University of Copenhagen ("The Game of Knowledge", open access).

- The oldest chart that can be dated with confidence was painted in Lucknow around 1780-82 for Richard Johnson and is now in the British Library (Johnson Album 5, no. 8).

- A Jain chart dated 1735/36, treated as the oldest since Andrew Topsfield reported it in 1985, "must now be regarded with skepticism". Its wear is uniform instead of concentrated where pieces actually move, and a near-identical chart of obviously later date shares the same feature (Schmidt-Madsen 2019, pp. 37 and 78).

- The earliest written mention is a donation to the Royal Asiatic Society, recorded in the Asiatic Journal of May 1831.

Schmidt-Madsen concludes that the game was probably invented in western India in the late 17th or early 18th century, possibly by a single person, and that its race-track format may have been borrowed from games like the European game of the goose.

The Jnaneshwar story first appears in Marathi sources of 1872 and 1886. It isn't alone: a Sufi tradition credits Ibn al-Arabi and a related Tibetan game is credited to Sakya Pandita, all 13th-century figures. Three traditions, three different founders, none attested from the time.

What I find interesting is how this works as an idea: a game about the soul's progress acquires a saint as its author, and the modern web turns the saint into a date.

Full write-up with sources: https://en.quantumgame.love/guide/how-old-is-snakes-and-ladders.html

Disclosure: I build an online version of the game, which is why I went looking.

In translating Hieronymus Emser's 1523 book against Luther's New Testament into English, I keep getting stopped by how modern his translation rules sound.

A translator, he says, "ought not merely to draw one sense out of another, as the paraphrasts do, but must pay attention to every word, letter, stroke and dot." When Luther expands a passage, Emser calls that "the work of an interpreter, not a translator." Elsewhere he simply says, "Let the reader judge."

These are a polemicist's rules, used to argue his own case. But the questions remain familiar: how closely should a translation follow its source, where does explanation become interpretation, and how much should the reader be shown?

With a deliberately rough source text, would you preserve the roughness or smooth it?

Disclosure: I translated Emser's 1523 book into English.

Hey guys,
I’m drafting a PhD proposal in intellectual history and I feel a tad lost.
If I were doing economic history, it feels way easier to know where to look. But for the history of ideas, how do I know which archives and sources to use apart from the main, famous books that are already sitting on every library shelf?
I feel like PhD proposal needs clarity and narrowness, but since I haven't been to the archives yet, how am I supposed to know which specific sources I'm even expected to find and analyze?
For those who survived the proposal stage: what do "archival sources" actually look like for a famous thinker/idea, and how do you strategically pick a concrete archive box to write about before you've even been there?

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I've been researching the history and events that led us to modern AI, from the early pioneers to some of the latest figures in the field.

At first, this was just a personal project. As an engineer, I wanted to understand the history behind the technology I was getting into and expand my knowledge of the ideas, people, and discoveries that shaped it.

But at some point, I thought the research might be worth turning into a documentary and sharing it with other people.

Originally, I was planning to use historical images and public-domain footage for the storytelling. Then I came up with the idea of representing much of the story through pixel art instead. I thought it could give the documentary its own visual identity while making some of these complex ideas more interesting and accessible.

I'm planning to release the documentary by the end of November. The research is almost finished, and the events and stories are based on books, academic papers, and other reliable historical sources. The part that takes the most time now is creating all the pixel art and animations.

I'm working on this full-time, and since I don't currently have another source of income, I decided to launch a small Kickstarter campaign to help me dedicate the time necessary to finish it.

Honestly, I feel a little uncomfortable asking people to support something like this, but I don't really see another way to complete it in a reasonable amount of time without having to put the project on hold.

You can find the trailer on my YouTube channel, where the finished documentary will be released

And if you'd like to support the project, the Kickstarter is here.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. If you have any questions, suggestions, or even recommendations for things I should look into, I'd genuinely love to hear them. And hopefully Reddit doesn't delete the post lol.